women so choose the can simply buy sperm and forget about the man who delivered it. meanwhile, the of seen fathers and uncles discarded, castellan of their homes and separated from their children. no wonder they look around the culture, shrugged and do their own thing. >> to come watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

>> in the developed world, these are centers of activity. if the rest of country rose to that of new york, our national gdp would increase to 43%. the three largest metropolitan areas in the u.s. produces the output but contains on the 13% of our population. the difference between prosperity is even stronger in the world. if you compare the countries with 50% of the population

living in urban areas with less than 50% of population living in urban areas, the urban areas are five times richer and have mortality levels that are one-third as high. they describe themselves as being more satisfied with their lives and jobs, that cities are the pass of out of poverty into pros prosperity for so much of the world. of course, we've seen the success of places like new york. they are fun, green, healthy. they are exciting places to be where the magic of human interactions tends to make the place more exciting. now, the idea behind this book, the reason, the claim that the book makes for why cities have come back is that cities play to human kind's greatest asset, which is our ability to learn from people around us.

we come out of the womb with a remarkable ability to learn from our parents, peers, siblings, people around us doing things that are smart and people around us who are screwing up. cities make that happen. cities are the ab sebs of -- absence of space between people, and coming to a city like new york, you experience this on rush of human experience that teaches you. when we observe the wages of people who come to cities, it's not that they immediately become more productive overnight, but year by year, they experience faster wage growth. they over years become more productive, and that's compatible with the view that cities are machines for learning. as was said more than a century ago, in dense clusters, the trades are no mystery. that is i think how places like new york and san fransisco and london work, and precisely because globalization and new technologies in connection

withed -- increased the means for being smart. while it's true globalization and new technologies caused the garment industry to disappear from new york city, they didn't eliminate good fashion ideas or the value to creating new images in new york because, after all, you can now sell them on the other side of the planet and produce them on the other side of the planet and take advantage of all the opportunities 234 a more -- in a more globalized world, but taking advantage of that requires innovation. we get smart by being around other smart people. now, things didn't always look so bright in new york city. when i was a kid growing up here in the 1970s, it looked as if not just the president ford, but history itself was telling new york to drop dead. the city seems mired in crime and disorder. the climate of that garment industry felt it left the city essentially unmourned.

know, that situation -- now, that situation was not on usual for new york. they were going through a process of deindustrialization. it was common for all of america's older cities. one of the themes for the book is that the american dream doesn't have to lie behind a white picket fence in the suburb, and that cities have been as intrinsic for american history and our experiences in the nation as any place else. the very birth of america has roots in boston in the 1730s between john hancock who wanted the political change to be created by a mob and sam adams who like many proveighers of liquor could conjure a mob. [laughter] it changed america and helped create this great country of ours. in the 19th century, the great problem was making the wealth of the american exterior accessible to the markets of the east and europe. cities made that happen.

they were a great transportation network that engaged the rich dark soil of iowa to be productive. it cost as much to move goods 32 miles over land as it did to ship them across the atlantic. it was difficult to access all the wealth in the american lands. cities grew up in modes of great transportation network, the chicago which was formed, started off when the illinois-michigan canal created a watering ark spanning from new york to northerly. rails only supplemented that transportation network initially based on water. indeed, all of the largest 20th cities in america were on a waterway and new york and boston where is where the river meets to the sea to the newest, minneapolis on the mississippi river. industry then grew up around those transportation modes. new york's three greatest

industries were sugar refining, printing and publishing, and garment production. sugar because new york was part of a triangle trade with the caribbean. it's how isaac roosevelt got involved in the business and became wealth. printing in publishing is one of my favorite stories. the big money in 19th century publishing was coming out with the latest walter scott and get it out first. new york's port made that happen. the thing that made the harper brothers succeed in the 1920s of the fact they could get the novels faster than the competitors because they were in new york, a great port that got the books first and they could print first and dominate the market.

chicago as well. chicago's greatest industry, the stockyards, of course, grew up around the rail yard. the stockyards were next to rail, and in detroit and even more remarkable event occurred in the rise of the automobile industry. it shows how cities formed for mundane reasons to create a change of innovation that created some of human kind's most greatest endeavors. go back to mid-19th century detroit, a city of small firms with smart people can connectionsed to outside world. there's trade and a great business in taking care of the engines on the ships going on the great lakes, so detroit, dry dock, a seminal firm, a great shipping entrepreneur comes there and they perform a critical role educating young people to work with engines like henry forted. he gets the start with engines in the fort dry dock.

he's part of a great chain of entrepreneurship. detroit feels like silicon valley in the 60s. there's an automotive genius on every streetcars, the fisher brothers, dodge brothers, everybody inventing and stealing ideas and supplying with input, all desperately trying to figure out the new, new thing, and they do it, and create this mass produced inexpensive automobile. now, one of the tragedies of detroit, and fortunately there's several of detroit that i'll talk about is that the way they figure it out is by -- the way they make mass produce the automobiles is by doing something that's fundamental. they build factories that are vertically integrated and provide employment for less educated americans on a grand scale. this is great and provides jobs for the american who struggle with a less education. that's wonderful. nothing is more amp thet call to

what makes cities work. little connection with the people around them, and for awhile, it's wildly productive, but when the economics change, when transportation costs fall, that production can easily move, and it can move to lower cost areas like the right-to-work states, and then automobile production can cross the globe, and when those conditions change, detroit didn't have the stuff to reinvent itself because it didn't have the culture of entrepreneurship and the skills for urban renewal. also, it's the way the government responded to it was exactly the opposite of what, in fact, detroit needed. the government responded in federal government shares blame in this, by subsidizing new structures with urban renewal and transportation infrastructure creating nonsensible investments like the rail, the people mover. a city like detroit, a declining city, already has an abundance

of infrastructure with people. the last thing you need is more structures in detroit, and yet the politics were there across the belt ready to build new buildings and you can declare them the come back city. that doesn't address the real problem of the area and the most important thing which is to make sure the children growing up in the cities have the skills to compete in a global economy and having something a birth right of everyone which is the safety of the streets. so, we have people mover that moves on empty street, but don't have the skills in detroit to enable it to come back. by contrast, new york did come back, and it came back not because of a government program, but because of private entrepreneurship, because of people coming up with new ideas and creating change. now, there are many reasons for this, part of it is new york's scale, global connections, these culture of entrepreneurship

coming from the garment industry, a very much of a haven for people who were getting their start operating new firms. i tell the story of alekort, before he declared 1930 would be a great building year. that didn't turn out. [laughter] before that, he started in garments and has a tremendous career that is in different industries. another entrepreneur started off in garments. the story, of course, of new york's come back is tied to a chain of innovation in finance. cities have always, always permitted these chains from one smart idea. think of renaissance florence. he passes that to his close friend and they pass it to his friend putting it on the wall of the chapel and st. peter finding a belly in a fish and passes it

on to a monk and passes it on and so on and so forth, one smart idea ripping on another. i think finance is like that, so my own sort of view of the chain of innovation in finance is it starts with people, many at the university of chicago like jimmy savage in thinking mathematically with the risk and return. some of that gets passed by students and trainers and this sophisticated ability to think about the return tradeoff makes its way to wall street. this is used by the young michael still in new york to sell high yield debt to enable investors to realize the security cares enough return to offset the risk. that enables henry to structure larger leverage buyouts and increase that industry. the understanding of risk and return makes secure the wave. the solomon brothers starting in

the mailroom is a great example of cities to nurture and sustain young talent. my favorite member of the chain is bloomberg himself. he's important in many ways during this phase. one of which is of course the data terminals are one part of the chain of making this increasingly sophisticated ability of risk and return possible with other data tools, but he's a great example of how cities create cross industry fertilization. they create the largest and successful elites of innovation. bloomberg comes from finance, but an i.t. entrepreneur and competes with silicone valley with his terminals, yet, he knows how to compete and outdo them because he knows the traders and ran the trading floor at solomon brothers and had knowledge gained in the city that no silicone valley person

could know. another reason i bring up bloomberg is the become in the book that i'm fond of of the bull pin in city hall. that bull pin is borrowed from the bull pins at bloomberg llp and before that, the solomon brother's trading floor. here you have some of the wealth est men on the planet and would sit in large protected offices and enjoy the space and privacy they could have, and yet they don't, they are right on top of each other because there's in an industry where knowledge matters more than space. that's how cities succeed and how new york came back. knowledge was more valuable than space. finance in in new york. there's no industry where knowing a little bit is more valuable, more important, and that's why there's a strong tendency of idea oriented industries to be the mainstay of

urban renaissance whether you're talking biotech in massachusetts or computers in greater san fransisco. you're talking about leveraging this ability on smart people who learn from one another. it's suggested that computers will make that obsolete, but i don't think that's true because there's something so fundamental about us as people that makes face-to-face contact so valuable. we evolved over years to have a rich set of tools to communicate with each other. anyone who taught knows the hard part about teaching is not knowing the information and your script, but it's knowing whether or not your audience gets it and your ideas are getting through. human beings have these great cues to signal confusion, and that's, you know, a critical part of transmitting complicated idea, and what new technology has done is make the ideas more complicated and raised the cost of screwing up properly.

cities also succeed and important because of the happen staps thing, because was things bloomberg would have never learned add a trading session. now, the success of new york suspect just about productivity. it's about the revivalist cities as places of pleasure as well as earnings, and if you go back to this sort of new york of the 1907s, this -- 1970s, this wasn't clear this was going to happen. you had to pay them to live there. [laughter] now people are willing to accept lower real wages than new york just to have the fun of living in the city. that didn't happen by accident, and the creation of livable cities required vast undertaking which are still not done with them in the developing world. these are the great challenges that lie ahead. if you go back to the 1800, a

boy could expect to live seven years less than our average. i don't know that we understand this. some say walking plays a major role for it. for younger new yorkers, it's clear why the death rates are lower. it's lower rates of motor vehicle accidents and taking the subway after drinking too much is better than driving drunk. [laughter] no self-respecting new yorker says they are happy. who does that? [laughter] that actually required investment and the local governments at the start of the 20th century spent as much on water as the national government spent on everything other than the army and post office. these up vestments were -- investments were real and important. while clean water required an engineering solution, other problems of urban life don't require engineering, so crime is a major challenge and something

that the city largely met. that also required, and this required serious government intervention, like handling the crime which was difficult. traffic congestion is a problem still with us, and i think in some sense in a way i like to describe it is that new york is running a soviet-style transport system. in the old soviet union, groceries were underpriced relative to market prices and given away at groceries. the way they were aloe kateed with stockouts and long lines. that's a new york city traffic jam. it's a long line and a stock out. now, the only way i know how to handle this is to price the product; right? you have to charge something for scarce space. that's what congestion pricing does. what we know from the data is that you can't just build your way out of traffic congestion. there's the fundamental law of traffic congestion says vehicle miles traveled increase one for

one are highways built. if you build it they will drive. there's one solution to that is make people pay for the social cost of their actions. the success of cities, of course, means that also creates a downside. the downside if you don't allow supplies to keep up with demand, cities become ungodly unaffordable, and that's one of the challenges that new york faces that, you know, cities like chicago which has been very friendly towards construction and maid it possible for young people without a lot of means to actually live in chicago. new york, under the bloomberg administration, moved productively towards allowing more construction, but if you look at the broad path from the 1970s to 1990s, prices were rising, and the city made it more and more difficult to build with draconian building laws and preservation districts. currently 15% of the land area in manhattan including central

12r5 park is a preservation district. it's not that adon't revere our -- i don't revere our architecture legacies, my father was an architecture, but not a post war glazed blake building needs to be preserved. [laughter] i draw on the wisdom of james jacobs in this book, and she understand the point. she observed that old buildings were cheap and new buildings were expensive, and this led her to think the way to keep new york and other cities affordable was to keep the old buildings and not build on tom of them or change them into new buildings. that's now how supply and demand works. if you restrict building, prices are going to go through the roof. that what we've seen in new york and particularly in our home. the village was affordable to

middle income families like herself. what middle income family can afford a townhouse in that village today? [laughter] the vast district made it difficult for the free market to supply housing. it's a great ironny that progressive states like new york, massachusetts, and california which care so much about providing affordable housing with people with less income do a bad job of it in comparison to texas, and they have never been in the attention for low cost housing, and yet they do a great job of it by unleashing the builders. the ability to deliver the space that people need is one of the sort of important lessons i try to get across in the book. now, there are many reasons why cities should have their, be relatively up leashed, but there's one reason i emphasize in the book which is the greenness of cities.

i want to lead into this with a little story about a young harvard graduate who went for a walk in the words. he and a friend went to do fishing. it was good because there wasn't much rain which made it easy to get a fish and cook a chowder. the wind flicked the flames to the nearby grass and a fire started which grew on the dry timber nearby and grew larger and larger. an inferno up sued. by the time it was done, more than 500 acres were burned. he was cascaded as an enemy of the environment. heit's hard to think, of course, of any bos p merchant who did as much damage to the environment as this young man in the woods. this young man today is the secular saint in

environmentalism. henry david thereau. if you love nature, you should stay away from it. [laughter] when i started acquiring small children five years ago, you can tell i'm and economist -- [laughter] i also moved to the woods, not that far from concord, and i started to do a heck of a lot more damage to the environment then too. it's not, you know, i'm taking no stand on, you know, the science of global warming in this book, but certainly if either you worry about it or heck, you worry about the price of gas at the pump, that, in fact, living in relatively compact urban spaces leads to less energy consumption. there's been work done, and one fact is that people who live in single family attached houses use on average 88% more electricity than people who live in apartments. the gas is so much smaller

controlling for income and family sized, but it is still there. a lot has to do with smaller housing units and less and less driving, so if you like green space, live in new york. the book though is not fundamentally about trying to urge any particular person to live in an area they don't want to live. i'm an economist, not a lifestyle consultant. the point of the book is america idolized a style of living and that involves white picket fences and suburbs and does not include living in urban apartments. we have a terrible series of policies that i want to be part of a dialogue about, and that's the hope of this book. three apart from cities doing themselves damage by restricting construction, but the three problems are the home mortgage interest deduction, transportation infrastructure

spending, and the way we handle schooling. in terms of home mortgage, it's problematic in the wake of the great housing crisis that we're bribing americans to extend themselves to the hilt. on top of this, they have to buy bigger houses and move away from urban apartments because 85% of single family attached houses are occupied and others are rented. renting out a house involves the depreciation of renters not taking care of it. homes depreciate by 1% a year. if you put a lot of owners under one roof, there's the chaos of a new york city co-op board. when you own, you push people away there dense urban living. transportation infrastructures, well, i'm not surprised, but deeply disappointed by the feddish for infrastructure in the recent budget. this infrastructure when filtered by the senate is

inevitably antiurban. during the stimulus, infrastructure spending per capita was twice as high in the least dense states than the most dense states. there's very little reason why the government should be in this business. america will no longer compete by producing and shipping natural resources and manufactured goods slightly cheaper than our exers. we compete with our minds and the innovation and entrepreneurship that happens naturally in cities. third thing, and i'll end with this is that so many parents leave cities because of the school issue, and in some sense the way we structured our school undoes the great vir chus of entrepreneurship. if you took new york's restaurant scene which is now one the greatest ever, if you start with the restaurant scene and up stead of having private innovation and lots of people

entering and closing and it turned out that thai-german fusion didn't work. [laughter] instead of doing that is you had a single food superintendent delivering food to canteens, this would be an awful place to eat, and yet that's what we've done to our schoolsment instead of letting entrepreneurship to come up with ideas, we turn that off. it's hard for anyone no matter how hard working to change from the top down. i have admiration for joe cline and he tried to introduce more competition in the school district, but the slow movement of schools under his research shows how heavy a lift this is. we had hopeful signs from people like the promise academy in harlem and other results in charter schools allowing some form of competition that does meaningful things in improving test scores, so i think we're unlikely to have better schools

and to have improvements in in area without hair harnnessing this. they are unlikely to have it if we tick with a monopoly on schooling. i'll end there, and, you know, i'm thankful for your attention and looking forward to learning from you in the dense confines of this urban environment. thank you very much. [applause] >> can you wait for the microphone since we are recording. over here. >> the cities are attracted to brilliant talent and wealth people is not counterintuitive. the question is are cities attractive to people who are

poor? the david brooks wrote a series about this in the atlantaic monthly 10 years ago talking about how happy people were in rural areas because there's less income up equality and a sense of community and the rural moral virtue in a community living. can you address those questions, and also would be great to talk about what you think about the cities and urbanism in the third world with problems of overpopulation and poverty are dominant. >> absolutely. those questions are connected. in fact, the new york issue is the hollowing of the middle class. it's not an issue of poverty. new york has a high poverty rate and all of urban america. cities have a higher poverty rate than suburban areas. the preponder rains is more evident from mumbai. that is seen as a sign of urban

failure, but i think it's a sign of urban success because cities are full of poor people because they attract them. they attract them with the promise of economic opportunity and in the case of the u.s., the ability to get around without a car for every adult. some of the work i cite in the book is the public transportation and one the facts when you build a new subway stop, poserty rates go up near that stop. does that mean subways make people poor? of course not. [laughter] they are attracting poor people who value the ability not to have a car for every adult that needs to get around. now, in the developing world, cities provide an even more important path out of poverty. you know, gandhi talked about the future of india was in the villages. this is nonsense. the future is in the cities which is the ways to connect with the outside world, places where poor indian come to be

middle class indians. it is unquestionably true that life is difficult, it's a life that none of us want to live for a day let alone for many years, but there are reasons why people come there. it beats the rural northeast of brazil and ballets living in a world of which time stands still and mortality is endemic. it dent mean they don't create challenges, and if we're close enough to exchange ideas and infect each other with a disease and close enough to sell you a newspaper, close enough to rob you. that's the point that cities require a certain amount of well-structured government. they require a government that oversees the provision of clean water, a government that handles congestion, a government that handles crime, and the tragedy of india is that its government policies engaging in regulating

areas that they had no business regulates, mumbai suffered terribly because of the limits of building up and kept the city far too lope and expensive, while at the same time they failed to provide the basics of urban life with the clean water. when i wander around a place like durabi, you are struck by the enormous power of entrepreneurship. there's one corner, a couple guys making bras and you feel like your in manhattan 100 years ago. then there's pots painted and carved out by kilns, and another corner people are recycling old plastic. i don't know about the ser rings, but the other things were reasonable, and yet, at the same time, there's a child dying in the street. that's the great challenge. the public sector is not doing the thing the public sector has to do and engaging for too much action in risk and returns it

shouldn't -- areas it shouldn't be. having cities requires better management and requires a good, but limited public sector that knows its job and does it seriously. >> let's go right back there. >> the central thesis you raise seems very similar to another colleague of yours at harvard, michael porter, in an article in 1990, the competitive end of nations, and he spoke about industries and clusters and innovation, competition and the like. it seems very similar. i wonder if you had any areas where you part company with michael in your thesis? >> well, i don't agree with that. in fact, we started -- my first work on cities was done 1990s at well. we were influenced by his work. one of the facts said the enormous correlation between establishment sizes, the competition and urban success.

i think that's, you know, seeing the vir virtues of ideas flow and this is an old idea. alfred marshall was high on this idea 120 years ago. i'm less optimistic about his vision for competitiveness in the inner city. i think actually there was probably too much of an emphasis on what their current comparative advantage is relative to thinking of game-changing things and radically increase the human capital in areas. i think that's the fundamental thing. it's not figuring out how to do low value added services, but how to provide the skills and connections that enable the areas to grow. of course, there's a whole 80% of the book about things unrelated to mai coal porter's core interest, but certainly i share his enthew yasm for

entrepreneurship and connecting with people in dense corridors. >> let's go over here. >> hi. the cover of your book has a picture of chicago, i think? >> it is, stretched out. >> anyone who been to chicago lately knows it looks amazing. it's clean, clean parks, and the census said chicago lost 200,000 people in the last 10 years, and at the same time, the exurban counties away from chicago were some of the fastest growing in the country. is that a problem? i mean, what could chicago do that it's not already doing? why are we seeing those results? >> chicago is a successful city in lots of dimensions and the right thing to do is the level sect chicago. they have a lot of things in

common with other rust belt cities. if you go back to the chicago i knew in 1988, that citied very much to be, you know, on a hinge of history; right? it seemed like it could go the path of cleveland or detroit rather than the path its on. it fights against very severe trends. there's no variable to better predict urban growth than january temperature and chicago's winters are tough. chicago also fights against the general move towards car-based living. chicago is a very decentralized city in terms of unemployment, and that that is also an issue with the city. now, that being said, you don't want to judge a city purely by population numbers; right? there's a lot of people moving to chicago as well as the fact there are some areas losing population. there's also in many areas depopulation because of larger families replaced by smaller

families. that's most evident in the 1970s with a huge population loss because of that. that's true of many large cities today, and often increasingly wealth population means you have more people iewp -- fewer people occupying the same space in which the population numbers go down. i have a lot of admiration for what the mayor has done and it is a successful city and area, and i think it's a mistake to just view the straight population numbers as being the only or the primary gauge of success. i mean, you also want to look at the income of the area, you want to clock look at the crime rate also which has shown tremendous progress under the mayor's leadership. >> okay >> you began your talk by citing one hard fact that the fraction of national output produced by large metropolitan areas exceeds the fraction of the population. which only a small number of

large metropolitan areas, it's hard to skew the result. we normal goods by the dollar or something. for example, if a restaurant meal costs $200, there was value created. there are ways there's more matter of opinion. for example, with gdp, there's a deflay tore implied and applies to the level or a state, and people could argue about whether it should be applied level of a city. for example, if a restaurant meal in new york city costs 200 and in kansas it costs $50. is one four times as valuable as another. that's an opinion. new york city is focused and dominated by the financial industry and as people can argue about whether financial transactions produce value as people claim. do you consider those issues of opinion as both issues of fact? >> so if you look across areas, looking at the relationship

between gdp per capita, it's a steady curve up. it's not as if new york and everything else is flat. if you look at particular industries, so you divorce yourself from the locally domestically trade and turn to the urban industries and you look at export oriented industries, there's a strong positive relationship between metropolitan area size and per capita employee output. it is certainly true that there is rarely a free lunch in city as in anything else, and the fact that there are higher prices in new york is the price of living in a productive fun place. it's nos at if -- not as if new york gives productivity without charging for them. that's the nature of space, the nature of cities, but if firms weren't more productive in metropolitan areas, they wouldn't pay the higher costs of

the workers paying them and staying in the areas, and, you know, we have decades of literature looking at economies which is what these are called in various ways, all of which, you know, fairly uniformly come down on the side there are strong benefits from other industries in vairs ways. -- various ways. >> to your point about competition in schools, despite joe cline's heavy lift, do you think going forward that there's a likelihood of an improvement in new york as well as other cities? >> you know, i'm hopeful. i'm an optimistic and i'm hopeful in places like new york because there's talent pushing on various margins; right? if you look at the promised academy and the harlem children, there's two things possible for that to happen, and it's much

more difficult than other cities, one which is with the wealth of philanthropic energy which is special of the city. it makes things work and things like the manhattan institute work. i'm strongly in favor of it. [laughter] the other thing, of course, is you can get great teachers. there are people who are, you know, willing to work for the promise academy which would be harder in a smaller and less, less a city with less richness in human capital, so the -- i continue to be optimistic about new york. it requires leadership at the center. there could be a bad term like who will be the next mayor, but i think people basically get that the energy of new yorkers will ensure a relatively good government outcome going forward, and that makes me optimistic about the city. i'm less optimistic about the declining cities with less education. i'm less optimistic they will be able to create change in this area. the good news is you start off on such a low base in education

and some of the centers of depp prevaition of the country, but i'm less optimistic of the ability of really meaningful political change in this area to work. remember, part of the job of an economist not running for office or planning to be confirmed for a political job is i'm supposed to say things that are politically impossible. if i limit myself to tomorrow, i'm not doing my job to try to push beyond that. i'm not the best judge of what's politically feasible any time soon. [laughter] >> time for one more question. >> a few years of the television reporter, in the rust belt -- >> you got the voice of a reporter. [laughter] >> good for radio. >> yeah. >> the question i got is how can we bring these rust belt cities back? a city on a great waterway, with a innovative center at the

university, but they face the slight of youth and capital. how do we bring that back? are we all to con -- gather around these cities? >> one of the glories of the united states is we have different types of cities. it's not that i believe everybody should live in new york city and there's a lot to like in smaller towns. that being said, those towns that have, you know, once existed because of transportation or because of the canal had a few large manufacturing industries that lost their way. these cities are facing enormous challenges. in the, you know, in the long run, education is the best fix for these areas, so middle-sized cities that are educated have done much better than middle-sized cities that are not. across metropolitan areas as the

share of the adult population with a college degree increases by 10%, employment goes up by 8% holding their education constant. it's an enormous value of skill people. education was very protective of areas and there was a strong connection of unemployment and the skills that metropolitan area has, more of a connection that 5% of college graduates are unployed and 15% of high school dropouts are employed. not investing in infrastructure is not what they need. in terms of relative cheap quality of life and in some sense, the bets economic development strategy at the urban level is to attract and train smart people and get out of their way. you want to be focused on policies to attract and train smart people and make sure you got rid of the things that get in the way of private

entrepreneurshipment on top of that, finally, related to the chicago question, you don't want to chase the will of the wisp of 1950. that isn't going to happen. i want to hear a big city mayor say yeah, my population drops 150,000, but they were well trained. i mean, ring just once -- i mean, just once, i want -- [no audio] >> least written over 25 books including airing dirty laundry and barak obama and the jim crow media.

join us for the three hour conversation on sunday, april 3 at 3 p.m. eastern. >> barak obama issued a proclay mages that this is read across america day. [cheers and applause] all right, president obama. [cheers and applause] >> there we go. >> we're grateful he did that and grateful that mrs. obama and mr. duncan is here. please welcome our special readers. [cheers and applause] >> all right, guys, sounds like you are excited. [cheers and applause] what are you excited about? thank you, thank you. we're also excited about reading; right? [cheers and applause] in our house, we read all the

time. did you know that? the president is a reader. we call him the facts guy. he knows facts about everything because he reads so much. you guys want to be facts people? you got to read in order to do that, but we're going to start out by reading something fun. secretary do you think duncan are big dr. seuss fans. >> we both have two children at home who are a little bit older than most of you guys, but if we had a nickel for every dr. seuss book we read, we'd be rich. the more you read for fun at home, turn the tv's off at night, reading the video video games alone, if you become lifelong readers, you can do anything you want to do. >> that's right. >> my parents were a little bit crazy. when i grew up, guess how many tvs we had?

>> 8? >> eight? we had zero. i would sneak to my friends' house to watch t. my parents red to us every night. it instilled in us the love of reading. the more you read for pleasure, whatever it is, storyings, mysteries, adventure, comic books, nonfiction, whatever it is, read for fun. if you do that, you'll do very, very well the rest of your lives. ready to hear a story? [cheers and applause] >> green eggs and ham. have you heard that one before? i am sam. i am sam. sam i am. that's sam i am. that's sam i am. i do not like that sam i am. do you like green eggs and ham? >> i do not like them, sam i am. i do not like green eggs and ham. >> would you like them here or there?

>> i would not like them here or there. i would not like them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam, i am. >> would you like them in a house? would you like them with a mouse? >> i do not like them in a house. i do not like them with a mouse. i do not like them here or there. i do not like them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them sam i am. >> would you eat them in a box? would you eat them with a fox? >> not in a box, not with a fox, not in a house, not with a mouse. i would not eat them here or there. i would not eat them anywhere. i will not eat green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam i am. >> would you, could you in a car eat them, eat them, here they are. >> i would not, could not in a car.

>> you will like them, you will see. you will like them in a tree. >> i would not, could not in a tree, not in a car. you let me be. i do not like them in a box, with a fox or in a house. i do not like them with a mouse. i do not like them here or there. i do not like them anywhere! i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam i am. >> a train, a train, a train, a train. could you, would you on a train? >> not on a train, in a tree, not in a car. sam, let me be. i would not, could not in a box. i would not could not with a fox. i will not eat them with a mouse. i will not eat them in a house, eat them here or there. i will not eat them anywhere! i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam i am. >> say, in the dark, here in the dark? would you could you in the

dark? >> i would not, could not in the dark. >> would you, could you in the rain? >> i would not, could not in the rain, not in the dark, in a drain, in a tree, i do not like them, sam you see. not in a house, in a box, not with a mouse or a fox. i will not eat them here or there. i do not like them anywhere! >> you do not like green eggs an ham? >> i do not like them. >> could you, would you with a goat? >> no. [laughter] >> i would not, could not with a goat. >> would you, could you on a boat? >> i could not, would not on a boat. i will not with a goat, i will not eat them in the rain. i will not eat them on a train, not in the dark, in a tree, not in a tree. you let me be. i do not like them in a box. i do not like them with a fox. i will not eat them in a house.

i do not like them with a mouse, eat them here or there. i do not like them anywhere! i do not like dpreen eggs and -- green eggs and ham. i don't like them, sam i am. >> you do not like them, so you say? >> yes. [laughter] >> i tried to tell you this. >> try them, try them, and you may. try them, and you may, i say. >> oh, sam, if you will let me be, i will try them, then you will see. >> is he trying them? >> yes. >> say, i like green eggs and ham. i do, i like them, sam i am, and i would eat them in a boat, and i would eat them with a goat, and i will eat them in the rain and in the dark and on a train

and in a car and in a tree. they are so good, so good you see, so i will eat them in a box, and i will eat them with a fox, and i will eat them in a house, and i will eat them with a mouse, and i will eat them here and there, and i will eat them anywhere! i love these, sam. i do so like green eggs and ham. thank you, thank you, sam i am. >> give her a round of applause. [cheers and applause] >> oh, my, i have some other very special guests for you. who do you think that might be? [inaudible conversations] no, president obama is not here. >> someone better. >> someone taller than president obama. cat in the hat? could cat in the hat be here?

where is cat in the hat? >> right there. >> where? >> right there. >> tell him to come out. come out, cat in the hat. [inaudible conversations] [cheers and applause] oh, my, and who else is that? thing one and thing two! [cheers and applause] oh, my. >> wow. >> oh, look at that tail. >> wow. [inaudible conversations] >> all right! now, with cat in the hat and thing one and thing two, all of us together and mrs. obama and secretary duncan, we want to do a readers pledge with you. are you ready? you have to raise your right hand. the other right hand. >> raise your hand. [laughter] raise them high, high.

all the hands up. >> when you hear me say something, repeat it after me loudly. are you ready? [cheers and applause] all right. i promise to read. >> i promise to read. >> each day and each night. >> each day and each night. >> i know it's the key. >> i know it's the key. >> to growing upright. >> to growing up right. >> i'll read to myself. >> i'll read to myself. >> i'll read to a crowd. >> i'll read to a crowd. >> it makes no difference. >> it makes no difference. >> if silent or loud. >> if silent or loud. >> i'll read at my desk. >> i'll read at my desk. >> at home and at school. >> at home and at school. >> on my bean bag or bed. >> by the fire or the pool. >> by the fire or the pool. each book that i read. >> each book that i read.

>> put smarts in my head. >> puts smarts in my head. >> because brains grow more thoughts. >> because brains grow more thoughts. >> the more they are fed. >> the more they are fed. >> i take this oath. >> i take this oath. >> of roading the way to feed my brine what it needs every day. >> of reading the way to feed my brain every day. [cheers and applause] [inaudible conversations] >> made for good rns is the name of the book. well-known author along with his daughter who is here at the national press club author

night. ms., tutu, what is this book about? >> i think mostly it's about that the essential quality of human beings is that we are good, our essential quality is our goodness. our behavior does not always bear out that essential quality, but it is my belief and my father's belief that our essential quality is goodness and everything else is an aberration, and we relate stories from both our lives, both of us are clergy, both with priests and pastors. my father famously chaired the truth of reconciliation commission, has been in all kinds of places where he has seen all kind of grief and horror. i have seen the same kinds of grief and horror, but on a more domestic scale in my role as a pastor, so i have a very clear sense of the pain that we can

inflict on one another as human beings, but i also know that that is not the essence of our being, and that we respond with horror to what is horrific because horror is not the essence of our being. >> are you also a resident of south africa? >> i'm not. i'm actually a resident of al exandrea, virginia. >> how long have you lived in the states? >> oh, more than 20 years except that i'm only 23, so -- >> do you miss, do you miss home? >> yes, i do. i miss home a lot, but in my role as executive director of the national institute of pill -- pilgrim imagine, i get to go home once a year. >> coauthor of made for g